Entering a New Golden Age of Chemical Engineering

Share This Post:

Preview Webinar:

Chemical engineering expertise is essential for a wide variety of areas that are shaping the world’s future, making this truly a new Golden Age of ChE. At the same time, a hallmark of our scientific and technological advances is that they must address larger contexts, and we must aid both industry and public decision-making. Consider these trends:

The new abundance of hydrocarbon resources

Biology’s turning into a molecular science

Computing’s evolution into a cyberinfrastructure

Manufacturing’s shift to emphasize processes and properties

Society’s need for the breadth and problem-solving approaches of chemical engineering.

Looking more broadly, for the next hundred years bio-oil products will face difficult competition with abundant gas and oil from hydrofracturing. That sets up conflicts between our intertwined societal aspirations of having both energy and environmental quality. Our knowledge is crucial for providing the technologies and the information to fill such needs wisely and to achieve our world's highest aspirations.

Phillip R. Westmoreland was 2013 President of AIChE. He is 2015 vice-chair of the AIChE Public Affairs and Information Committee, a trustee of the AIChE Foundation, and a trustee and past president of the educational nonprofit CACHE Corporation ( www.cache.org ). He is Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University (NCSU). His chemical engineering degrees are from NCSU (BS, 1973), Louisiana State University (MS, 1974), and MIT (PhD, 1986). H e has previously worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory/Union Carbide (1974–1979), as a ChE faculty member at the... Read more

June Wispelwey, executive director of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) is a chemical engineer and business leader with vast work experience in the chemical and bio-pharmaceutical fields. Prior to becoming AIChE executive director, June served as executive director of the Society for Biological Engineering (SBE), a technical community within AIChE, overseeing its successful launch and growth. Under her leadership, SBE developed a successful consortium to advance genomic research on the Chinese hamster ovary cell lines which are important to pharmaceutical and... Read more

Checkout

Do you already own this?

Pricing

AIChE Members

Free

AIChE Undergraduate Student Members

Free

AIChE Graduate Student Members

Free

Non-Members

$0.00

Webinar content is available with the kind permission of the author(s) solely for the purpose of furthering AIChE’s mission to educate, inform and improve the practice of professional chemical engineering. All other uses are forbidden without the express consent of the author(s). For permission to re-use, please contact chemepermissions@aiche.org.